Daanika Kamal’s Domestic Violence in Pakistan does not simply present a legal analysis in the abstract; it takes us to the courtroom, to police stations, to whispered family negotiations, and to the private anguish of women navigating various strategies to protect themselves. Yet so often the justice system betrays them. Kamal stands again in Islamabad’s district courts, the place where she once fought her own legal battle for divorce. She describes walking briskly through the overcrowded corridors, her body remembering precisely how fear and determination feel when compressed together. The courtroom she enters for fieldwork is the same space where she had once been positioned as both bad and mad: accused of abandoning her duties as a Muslim wife and dismissed as mentally unstable when she spoke about what she endured. ‘Judges will read the paperwork, observe the victim and see how she speaks and acts and they assess her themselves. If the judge thinks that the victim looks very mentally unstable then he could ask for a psych­iatrist to assess, but that is at the judge’s discretion and usually it is not done nor is it needed’ (p.171). This book is written from within the system it critiques. And it presents the central analytic question: Why and how are women who report domestic violence constructed by the Pakistani legal system as either “bad” or “mad,” and what purpose does this serve? Kamal claims that ‘in investigating the use of character allegations that frame women as ‘bad’ and/ or ‘mad’ as gendering strategies in the construction of victim-subjects of domestic violence in Pakistan, this book does not limit itself to analysing cases under a specific law. Rather, it brings forth empirical and theoretical insights from the larger legislative landscape of domestic vio­lence, which encompasses both criminal and family law ambits’ (p.20).

Daanika Kamal’s Domestic Violence in Pakistan: The Legal Construction of “Bad” and “Mad” Women (OUP 2025) offers a critical, empirical, and theoretically informed analysis of how the Pakistani justice system treats survivors of intimate partner abuse. The book’s central argument is that women who report domestic violence are often discursively constructed by legal actors as either inherently “bad” (immoral, disobedient) or “mad” (unstable, untrustworthy), thereby undermining their credibility and marginalising their voices. Kamal demonstrates that these victim‐subjects are shaped not by the violence they endure but by prevailing gendered narratives; ‘captures and offers empirical insights in relation to gendered subject formation in discursive spaces’ (p.5), revealing how societal narratives, police practices, and even lawyerly strategies combine to minimise and silence women’s harms (chapter 3). This emphasis on discourse and subjectivity is grounded in feminist poststructuralist theory; she draws on gendering strategies in institutional and disciplinary settings to explain how courtrooms produce various types of victims (p.25).

Kamal calls for procedural safeguards to prevent the moralisation of credibility, including stronger evidentiary standards for psychiatric claims, improved transcription and documentation of proceedings, and a legal politics that combines reform with critical vigilance. The recommended procedures include among others judicial and bar training on the limits of character evidence and the gendered consequences of ‘moral credibility’ reasoning, as well as improved court recording practices to prevent clerk-summary distortions. Kamal reminds us of a “cautious optimism” about whether justice system reform is judicious. By doing so, she neither romanticises the prospects of law reform nor simply refers to feminist approaches to arenas outside the legal sphere.

What I like about this book is that Daanika Kamal does not take women’s victimhood as a given; instead, she asks how the subjectivities of women claiming abuse are constructed, captured and negotiated by legal actors. ‘By adopting a process-based structure to shadow the stories and narratives of women complainants as they move through various stages of the judicial system, it advanced four thematic investiga­tions which served to address why the subjectivity of women victims of abuse is shaped in particular ways, and how these subjectivities are captured and negotiated within the Pakistani legal system’ (p.193). Therefore, the research examines courtroom language, judicial reasoning, police reports, and lawyers’ arguments to determine how gender norms shape judicial outcomes. For example, Kamal ‘investigates how these boilerplate texts are in­corporated into lawyerly practices, examine the contents and allegations included within these texts, and explore how this one- size- fits- all approach can be viewed as a gendering strategy that helps legal actors construct victim- subjects of domestic violence’ (p.127). The breadth of discourse analysis, from police files to judgments, is an especially valuable feature, as it highlights that intersectionality and institutional complicity in gender violence operate at multiple levels.

Kamal’s methodology is remarkably comprehensive and mixed-method. She combines qualitative interviews, case file analysis, court observation and personal narrative. A significant strength of her book is its detailed exposition of how courts, related mechanisms of justice and legal institutions perpetuate gendered biases. Kamal shows that when women invoke laws against domestic abuse, a series of obstacles almost routinely emerges. For example, chapter two discusses how ‘institutions such as the police may adopt a functional pur­pose in facilitating the sanctity of the private sphere as a means to serve the State’s gendered, nationalist discourse’ (p. 92).

In court, these institutional biases take legal form. Kamal finds that defence lawyers frequently employ gendering strategies by attacking a woman’s character or mental stability. For example, one mother-in-law might testify that the complainant is nasty or mentally unwell, casting doubt on her allegations. Judicial rhetoric often echoes this: judges may describe complainants as overly emotional, as if faulting them for the violence they experienced. In Kamal’s terms, these are societal narratives that minimise and silence women’s harms. The book also shows that police, lawyers, and even social workers often act according to patriarchal gender norms. As the book sets out in detail, police assist in maintaining the ‘secrecy’ of familial violence by urging women to resolve issues privately. Similarly, family law procedures (e.g. family arbitration or councils) tend to emphasise women’s “duties” to family unity over their rights to safety.

One of my favourite chapters is Chapter Three: Silencing Victim-Subjects: Gendered Narratives. This chapter examines how gendered narratives and character allegations are used to silence women who report domestic violence in Pakistan, shaping their identity as particular kinds of “victims.” Kamal argues that silencing operates both socially and institutionally, as women’s experiences are often dismissed, reframed, or spoken over by others in ways that delegitimise their claims and uphold patriarchal norms. The discussion begins by outlining the victim–survivor paradox, noting that women prefer to identify themselves as “victims” rather than “survivors”. This is not because they lack agency, but because the term “victim” more accurately reflects the ongoing nature of their marginalisation, even after leaving abusive homes. Women describe how even as they seek help abuse continues —through public suspicion, social shame, and institutional disregard. As one interviewee explains, a woman who seeks legal or institutional support is quickly framed as morally suspect: ‘He will say she has a bad character…that she is mentally not okay…and the majority of society will believe him’ (p.67).   The chapter then illustrates how character allegations—claims that a woman is immoral or mentally unstable—are strategically used to undermine credibility. These “psy” labels function as gendered tools of social control, suggesting that the woman’s account is unreliable and that her behaviour—not the perpetrator’s violence—is the cause of conflict. One example that will stay with me is where a woman recounted being physically abused during pregnancy and was later accused of being aggressive and mentally unstable in legal proceedings. She explains that during arbitration, ‘they only heard him…it was as if I was invisible’ (p.66). This invisibility is central to silencing; women are spoken about, rather than spoken to, as judges, police officers, family, and perpetrators replace their voices with narratives aligned to respectability politics and patriarchal morality. The chapter draws on Foucault, who describes how power operates through language to produce ‘docile bodies’ (p.80). In this framework, women who conform, are quiet, obedient, and suffer silently, are seen as ‘ideal victims’ (p.68). At the same time, those who protest or seek justice are framed as active and therefore suspect or blameworthy. However, the chapter also highlights women’s agency. Despite silencing practices, women use legal processes strategically, sometimes to seek protection, sometimes to negotiate custody, maintenance, or safety. Their choices demonstrate that victimhood and agency are not opposites, but co-existing experiences shaped by circumstance. Therefore, the silencing is not just about the absence of speech, but about the reconstruction of women’s experiences through gendered, moral, and psychiatric narratives that shape how the law sees, and fails to see, them.

Kamal’s book fills an essential gap in Global South feminist legal scholarship. Much writing on gender-based violence in Pakistan has focused on describing law reform; Kamal adds a new dimension by closely analysing how the justice system constructs victims. In doing so, she shifts the emphasis from statutory change to the culture of justice. In chapter seven, she identifies cross-cutting conclusions on how such allegations shape the subjectivity of women complainants and alter their narratives, and how this relates to secondary victimisation outcomes. ‘This chapter also presents a vision for the way forward, by re­flecting on how the law can be (re)imagined as a space that recognises and values women’s lived experiences, how the iterative relationship between domestic abuse and mental health can be accommodated within legal settings, and how, ultimately, legal responses to domestic violence can pri­oritise the safety of women and clear pathways for justice’ (p.23). Her post-structuralist approach is relatively novel. This approach ‘attempt[s] to overcome ontological and textual positions through a more relational conceptualisation of how gendered subjects come into being’ (p.25). I enjoyed reading this meticulously researched and theoretically ambitious study because the author combines narrative depth and critical analysis of domestic violence in Pakistan, with an original focus on discourse and subjectivity. Kamal has written this book, most importantly, for domestic violence survivors who continue to fight daily for justice; this matters greatly.

© Bloomsbury Pakistan 2025